Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides an excellent, non-invasive diagnosis tool for many, often life threatening, diseases. MRI is particularly useful in the study and diagnosis of brain diseases. Accordingly, MRI systems have received wide acceptance by radiologists and other medical professionals for diagnostic use despite the high cost of acquiring and operating such systems.
Tragically, infants, particularly premature infants, may be afflicted with diseases that may affect their future development. For example, infants may suffer from various diseases of the brain, such as hemorrhage, infarction, hypoxia-ischemia, which if improperly diagnosed may cause severe developmental issues and even be life threatening. Accordingly, the use of MRI systems in studying and diagnosing disease in infants in many situations is highly desirable.
Despite the desirability of use of MRI systems in studying and diagnosing disease in infants, such use is not without challenge. For example, there are presently no readily available MRI systems specifically adapted for infant use. The MRI systems that are available for use present issues with respect to limited choice of radio frequency (RF) receiver coils (i.e., available RF receiver coils typically do not include a configuration fully matching the needs of infant use). This results in infant MRI requiring the use of the relatively high field strength (e.g., 1.5 Tesla (T)) MRI systems to provide acceptable image quality for diagnosis. The use of high field MRI systems on infants results in many undesired consequences, such as relatively high scanning costs, increased noise levels experienced by the infant, increased exposure to RF energy by the infant, etc. However, merely reducing the field strength for imaging infants is not possible as the configurations thereof would produce images of unacceptable poor image quality.
In addition to the foregoing, present MRI systems present logistical issues with respect to their use with infants. For example, with present MRI system configurations transportation of a premature infant between the scanning room and the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is risky as the premature infant should not be subjected to too excessive movement and various environments.